Analysis and Design for Intelligent Manufacturing Cloud Control Systems

New cloud services are being developed to support a varied of technology applications. In this paper, a new cloud service: Intelligent Manufacturing Cloud Control is given, which includes different functionalities of intelligent manufacturing system as a model: cloud feedback control, cloud worflow scheduling, cloud containers. This paper focuses on the fact that cloud control system is most time-critical and demanding functionality. Hence, a novel intelligent manufacturing cloud control systems architecture is proposed, and time savings under such proposed architecture is fully analyzed. It is shown that signficant cost and time savings could be achieved, mainly due to the virtualization of controllers and the reduction of hardware cost. Moreover, a task-based delay triggered cloud worflow scheduling strategy is proposed to minimize the makespan of intelligent manufacturing cloud control worflows. To experimentally evaluate our approach, the controllers are implemented on cloud environment and control industry-standard plant. The experimental results show that the proposed cloud controllers perform indistinguishably from the local controllers.